if you have the initiative to buy a plane ticket and go to libya, syria, and start reporting on the war, within a year, you can be an established war reporter and that is a wonderful thing about journalism, but also extremely dangerous. >> tell me about your personal experience. obviously part of the reason you wrote this book was because of your friend. you also wrote it based on an experience you had when there was a moment you were in a war zone and realized it could be me. >> i was in sierra leone, at a rebel check point. these guys stepped out of the jungle with machine guns and basically threatened to kill everybody. they obviously didn't. i spent about 15 minutes trying to get myself ready for that and obviously, it was a 15 minutes i thought i was going to be executed and it was a 15 minutes that really changed me and so, i wrote about that in the article for "vanity fair", but then later, i thought wouldn't it be interesting if we ratcheted it up a bit fictionally to figure out what happens in a situation like that, like they do start killing people. how do you react? >> it's i